Berkeley, a City in History"

"Berkeley, A City in History" by Charles Wollenberg © 2002 Chapter 1 - First Settlers In the year 2000 the Berkeley city council approved formal landmark status for the Indian shellmound that once stood near the mouth of Strawberry Creek in West Berkeley. Scientists estimate that the mound, actually a giant midden filled with the remains and material remnants of the society that created it, was used for more than three thousand years, from 3000 BC to 800 AD. Like dozens of its companions along the bay shore, the Berkeley shellmound was leveled and paved over in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But some remains of the structure survive under the Truitt and White lumberyard and the Spengers Restaurant parking lot. Opponents of the landmark proposal, mainly property owners concerned about limits on development, argued that the site was not eligible for landmark status since it was "archeological" rather than "historical". Although the precise difference between these categories is not entirely clear, the city council's approval implicitly recognizes that Berkeley's history doesn't just begin with the arrival of American residents a hundred and fifty years ago, but extends back thousands of years to the area's very first settlers. The Huichin When the Europeans initially arrived in the late eighteenth century, Berkeley was inhabited by the Huichin, part of the larger Ohlone or Costanoan linguistic and cultural group which occupied coastal regions from the central Bay Area south to Monterey Bay. Like all Ohlone peoples, the Huichin lived in bands of a few hundred individuals inhabiting a well-defined hunting and gathering territory. Their villages were collections of small, conical-shaped thatch houses, often surrounding larger public and ceremonial structures. Although they made no use of metals, the Huichin manufactured a great variety of tools, implements and household goods, including wonderful baskets woven so tightly they could be used to store water. The Huichin hunted rabbits and other small rodents, a well as deer, elk and antelope. They snared migratory birds in the vast marshlands that once bordered San Francisco Bay and gathered shellfish from the mud flats and tidelands. They caught trout, steelhead and salmon in fresh-water streams and navigated the bay in thatch boats propelled by double-bladed paddles. Although hardly pacifists, their warfare took the limited form of feuds and retaliatory raids on neighboring peoples rather than all-out campaigns of conquest and domination. The Huichin lived lightly, but by no means invisibly, on the land. They burned grasslands to promote the growth of edible plants and dug up the soil of meadows to harvest roots and tubers. They trimmed trees and bushes to stimulate the production of basket-making material and gathered huge harvests of acorns, whose meal was their diet staple. The work of countless generations of Huichin women, grinding acorns and other seeds and nuts, have produced deep indentations in rock formations that are still visible in Mortar Rock Park in North Berkeley. As author Malcolm Margolin has put it in his book The Ohlone Way, before the arrival of Europeans "the Bay Area was a deeply inhabited environment, and its landscape bore the cultural imprint of its people as surely as did the farmlands of Europe or New England." The shellmounds, created by peoples who may have preceded the Huichin by centuries, were among the most dramatic of these "imprints." Twentieth century University of California anthropologists examined the layers of material deposited in the mounds, effectively documenting the evolution of Indian material culture over thousands of years. While the scientists found evidence of subtle transformations in toolmaking, diet and other cultural forms over the centuries, from our perspective it is remarkable how little life seemed to have changed. When the Spaniards arrived in the 1770s, the Huichin were living in much the same way that people had lived on these shores three thousand years earlier, at the time of the Trojan War. The Huichin and their predecessors had achieved a stable, successful adaptation to the environment and saw little reason for rapid change. They seemed to understand the principle of agriculture, but given the abundance of wild food sources, found no need to practice it (except, possibly, for the cultivation of a strain of wild tobacco whose use would be frowned upon by health-conscious contemporary Berkeleyans ). The Huichin way of life emphasized continuity and tradition rather than innovation. They were certainly familiar with their neighbors and participated in complex trading networks that stretched for hundreds of miles, but the Huichin were, in author Theodora Kroeber's words, "true provincials." They knew the landscape of their particular hunting and gathering territory with a degree of intimate detail and specificity that modern Californians can scarcely comprehend. To say the Huichin were "settlers" of the land that was to become Berkeley is an understatement. They were linked to that land by the most central elements of life, spirit and culture. Spanish Colonialism The beginning of the end of the Huichin way of life came when Captain Gaspar de Portola made the first European contact with San Francisco Bay in 1769. Ordered by the Spanish colonial authorities in Mexico City to establish settlements in California, Portola and a small band of soldiers were looking for Monterey Bay but stumbled on San Francisco instead. They retreated and finally recognized Monterey, establishing settlements there in 1770. But two years later, Governor Pedro Fages led an exploratory expedition along San Francisco Bay's eastern shore and may have camped on the banks of Strawberry Creek, possibly near what today is the West Gate of the U.C. campus where a monument commemorates the event. Four years later, in 1776, Captain Juan Bautista de Anza founded the first Spanish-speaking settlement on the bay. A military man worried about rival European colonial powers, Anza picked an ideal defensive location---a mesa overlooking the Golden Gate that has been the site of the San Francisco Presidio ever since. If the presidio was located on the west side of the bay, it made sense that the first religious/agricultural institution, Mission Dolores, be located there as well. Not until two decades later, in 1797, was a settlement established on the east side of the bay---Mission San Jose in what is now southern Alameda County. By then, the East Bay was already called "contra costa," the opposite or other shore. As early as the 1790s, the implication was that the shore, the place where the action and power was supposed to be, was the San Francisco side of the bay. Unlike the New England colonies, where English-speaking people came in relatively large numbers to work the land and push the native peoples away, Spain sent very few Spanish-speaking people to a new colony such as California. They were to serve as the ruling class, the colonial masters, while the work was done by the colonial subjects, the native peoples. For the Spanish colony to succeed, the Indians had to be integrated into the new society as a colonial workforce. But in the Bay Area, as in most of California, the Indians were hunting and gathering peoples whose way of life had little in common with that of the Spanish Empire. Spain intended not only to conquer and Christianize the Huichin, but also to change their entire culture and transform them into an agricultural people who could cultivate fields, tend stock and practice European crafts. To accomplish this daunting task, the Spanish brought to California what by 1769 was a tried and true colonial institution, the mission. The mission's religious purpose was certainly to Christianize the Indians and save their souls, but the Franciscan friars also disciplined and organized the Indians and taught them the skills, habits and attitudes of an effective colonial working class. While the missions intended to destroy most of the Indian way of life, they ended up unintentionally destroying most of the Indian people as well. On and around the missions, Indians contracted European diseases for which they had little or no immunity, and the death rate soared. The Huichin were affected by this process as early as the 1780s, as Mission Dolores recruited Huichin converts and mission livestock was introduced onto Huichin territory. By 1820 there seem to have been no more native people left in what today is Berkeley. A terrible process of decimation through colonialization left areas that had been extensively populated for at least three thousand years essentially empty of human habitation. Enter the Peraltas Along with the mission, the Spanish also brought the presidio, or frontier fort to California. While only four formal presidios were established (at San Diego, Monterey, San Francisco and Santa Barbara), soldiers were part of every Spanish-speaking settlement. Each mission and pueblo (civilian town) had a detachment of soldiers to protect against Indian uprising and enforce the authority of the Franciscan friars. Most of the Spanish-speaking settlers in colonial California were thus soldiers and their families. Included in this group was Corporal Gabriel Peralta and his family, who came to the Bay Area as part of the Anza expedition of 1776. Like most of the "Spanish" settlers in California, the Peraltas were natives of northwestern Mexico. Of ethnically mixed background and of something less than upper class origins, people like the Peraltas were the founding fathers and mothers of Spanish California. No matter what had been their social status back in Mexico, they were, by definition, the new colony's elite. The Peralta family included Gabriel's seventeen-year-old son, Luis, who in the early 1780s followed in his father's footsteps and joined the army.

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